Iran Is Ready for a Deal

“Iran’s Nuclear Triumph” roared the headline of the Wall Street Journal editorial. William Kristol is again quoting Churchill on Munich.

Since the news broke Saturday night that Iran had agreed to a six-month freeze on its nuclear program, we are back in the Sudetenland again.

Why? For not only was this modest deal agreed to by the United States, but also by our NATO allies Germany, Britain, and France.

Russia and China are fine with it.

Iran’s rivals, Turkey and Egypt, are calling it a good deal. Saudi Arabia says it “could be a first step toward a comprehensive solution for Iran’s nuclear program.”

Qatar calls it “an important step toward safeguarding peace and stability in the region.” Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have issued similar statements.

Israeli President Shimon Peres calls the deal satisfactory. Former Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin has remarked of the hysteria in some Israeli circles, “From the reactions this morning, I might have thought Iran had gotten permission to build a bomb.”

Predictably, “Bibi” Netanyahu is leading the stampede:

Today the world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world.

But this is not transparent nonsense?

In return for a modest lifting of sanctions, Tehran has agreed to halt work on the heavy water reactor it is building at Arak, to halt production of 20-percent uranium, to dilute half of its existing stockpile, and to allow more inspections.

Does this really make the world “a much more dangerous place”?

Consider the worst-case scenario we hear from our politicians and pundits—that Iran is cleverly scheming to get the U.S. and U.N. sanctions lifted, and, then, she will make a “mad dash” for the bomb.

But how exactly would Tehran go about this?

If Iran suddenly moved all its low-enriched uranium, to be further enriched in a crash effort to 90 percent, i.e., bomb grade, this would take months to accomplish.

Yet, we would be alerted within hours that the uranium was being moved.

Any such Iranian action would expose Barack Obama and John Kerry as dupes. They would be discredited and the howls from Tel Aviv and Capitol Hill for air and missile strikes on Natanz, Fordo, and Arak would become irresistible. Obama and Kerry would be forced to act.

War with Iran, which would mean a shattered Iran, would be a real possibility. At the least, Iran, like North Korea, would be sanctioned anew, isolated and made a pariah state.

Should Iran test a nuclear device, Saudi Arabia would acquire bombs from Pakistan. Turkey and Egypt might start their own nuclear weapons programs. Israel would put its nuclear arsenal on high alert.

If, after a year or two building a bomb, in an act of insanity, Iran found a way to deliver it to Israel or a U.S. facility in the Middle East, Iran would be inviting the fate of Imperial Japan in 1945.

So, let us assume another scenario, that the Iranians are not crazed fanatics but rational actors looking out for what is best for their country.

If Iran has no atom bomb program, as the Ayatollah attests, President Hassan Rouhani says he is willing to demonstrate, and 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded six years ago and again two years ago, consider the future that might open to Iran—if the Iranians are simply willing and able to prove this to the world’s satisfaction.

First, a steady lifting of sanctions. Second, an end to Iran’s isolation and a return to the global economy. Third, a wave of Western investment for Iran’s oil and gas industry, producing prosperity and easing political pressure on the regime.

Fourth, eventual emergence of Iran, the most populous nation in the Gulf with 85 million citizens, as the dominant power in the Gulf, just as China, after dispensing with the world Communist revolution, became dominant in Asia

Why would an Iran, with this prospect before it, risk the wrath of the world and a war with the United States to acquire a bomb whose use would assure the country’s annihilation?

America’s goals: We do not want a nuclear Iran, and we do not want war with Iran. And Iran’s actions seem to indicate that building an atom bomb is not the animating goal of the Ayatollah, as some Americans insist.

Though she has the ability to build a bomb, Iran has neither conducted a nuclear test, nor produced bomb-grade uranium. She has kept her supply of 20-percent uranium below what is needed to be further enriched for even a single bomb test. Now, she has agreed to dilute half of that and produce no more.

If Iran were hell-bent on a bomb, why has she not produced a bomb?

Just possibly, because Iran doesn’t want the bomb. And if that is so, why not a deal to end these decades of sterile hostility?

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15 Responses to Iran Is Ready for a Deal

Pat Buchanan’s arguments here are very reasonable. However, the matter of fact is that the Israeli and neo-con hawks are not really afraid of a nuclear Iran. They pretend they are, but they know how totally laughable it is to be afraid of such a thing. What they want is the continuation of sanctions and a humiliation of Iranian regime. Iranian Mullas know this and suspect that even if they totally abandon all nuclear activity, the hawks on the other side are going to find other excuse to prolong sanctions.

This whole thing is a shame. Iran can not and will not be an “existential threat” to Israel, and the sanctions are just eroding the Iranian middle class (the most western-friendly middle class in the whole middle east) and helping the most hardcore fanatics in Iranian political scene to have a voice and a role. In other words, hardliners on both side are very neatly helping each other.

“America’s goals: We do not want a nuclear Iran, and we do not want war with Iran.”

In the era of the satrapy of the Shah, American leadership of the time very much wanted a nuclear cat’s paw in Iran. (In a repeat of Iraq, the accusation of WMD is because the west supplied such materiel in the past, just as was the case to Israel.)

Some elite folk in America very much want war and some of them are in American leadership positions. Others supply the lifeblood of cash to politics to buy foreign policy, such as the gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, famous Likud-Firster by his own admission.

Too, war is the health of a certain kind of historically dysfunctional state, one that America has come to sadly resemble more and more in the last decade, as democratic accountability to the American people has been eroded. Both the Founders and more recently Eisenhower, as it metastasized, warned against a standing imperial military and its propensity to subsume domestic freedom and prosperity.

The core problem is Israel’s “Greater Israel” delusion. Netanyahu supposedly said his concern about Iran getting nukes would be that the Palestinians would have a way of resisting more Israeli land grabs which are part and parcel of the drive to expand Israel from “sea to sea.” As James Baker once warned the Israelis about the folly of Greater Israel, the best thing that could happen on Capitol Hill would be to reiterate that warning.

“In my eyes, American policy is not coming out of weakness. It comes out of power,” said Carmi Gillon, former head of Shin Bet (who spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board two weeks ago ).

Are the only people who are allowed to contradict Netanyahu and AIPAC former heads of Shin Bet, or highly decorated IDF veterans, or someone else who has spent most of his life defending Israel?

Are we to believe that these Israelis who DO contradict Bibi and The Bibettes a bunch of Quislings — that THEY don’t love Israel, that they are willing to risk the lives of their children and grandchildren recklessly?

Why in the hell is it that we are just supposed to bow down and do Bibi’s bidding, when there are Israelis with impeccable credentials in defending that country who DON’T ?

The Netanyahu and Likud position is total dismantlement of the Iranian nuclear program with no enrichment capability.

Pat is right, that is an ultimatum, which only capitulation & surrender will satisfy.

Iran will never agree to capitulation & surrender. To believe such is unrealistic, even naïve.

So, to make good the threat, war, by necessity, is the only recourse (continued sanctions does not stop the Iranian nuclear program — it only encourages Iran to speed development) for committed Netanyahu supporters.

Expose the inevitability of regional war with the Netanyahu ultimatum and make rejectionists responsible for what their position really amounts to: A call for a U. S. war of aggression against Iran.

Shine the light on their ultimate designs for war, catastrophic to the region, dangerous to the world, and crippling to the economy of the United States.

Thanks for this Mr. Buchanan. To pick up from T. Sledge: It has become clear to me, belatedly, that Bibi is/has a messianic personality, and that all of his positions are not to represent Israel as he claims, but himself. He must be the savior of Israel and to that end must invent an apocalyptic threat to which he is the only answer.

How else to interpret the contradictory positions of Shimon Perez, of former and current Israeli intelligence personnel, of the American intelligence community, of practically all other world and regional leaders?

Come to that: how can so many in our Congress and media be in the thrall of such a personality? Oh, scratch that…

I’m convinced, at this point, that the greatest danger to Israel is Bibi Netanyahu himself.

Buchanan leads the charge of the Light Headed Brigade as he promotes the fallacy that this is a reasonable beginning at ending “these decades of sterile hostility.” Of course he does not address the reality that with the harshest restrictions in place currently, Iran still has not shifted any of its nuclear appetition–so what rational excuse can he offer to underwrite the idea that if the constraints are loosened, the Iranians will choose another path? In a word, none! Buchanan offers nothing other than the same old vacuous logic which tickles the ears of Israel bashers, a pastime which he and apparently a number of others here seem to enjoy.